(And - I'm not Septima, but I'll do my best to do right by you on the Arithmancy. She was alway praising your skills there. I'm decent at it, but I had to work for every bit, not like those of you who have the gift for it.)
Alde was a grand old Slytherin witch - over 110 when I met her, plots that ran decades, very clear about her ambitions and her standards and her ideas of how the world should behave. Absurdly high standards and expectations.
Terrifying. I spent most of the first year in tears every night, because I felt stupid all the time. But I knew she'd taken me on as a favour to Alcor (my predecessor, teaching) and I didn't want to let him down, so I kept slogging through it.
It wasn't the Astronomy that was the thing, but all the other skills she thought I needed. Latin. German. Grammar. Rhetoric. Etiquette. How to talk to people at parties. All the social things I'd need to manage the Guild, being a Master. (And as it turns out, being married. She would have laughed and laughed at that.) It got a lot better, after that first year, and I have so many fond memories of sitting by the fire in her library talking on cloudy nights, and her putting music on, or talking about literature and plays and all sorts of things.
She's the one who pointed out that if I was going to teach, I should train as a generalist, so I worked on her chart project as her apprentice, but she also set it up so I worked on projects with other people, did things to demonstrate I really knew what I was doing. Well, half a dozen reasons for that, one of them named Alexander Donnelly.
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Date: 2015-01-07 03:01 am (UTC)(And - I'm not Septima, but I'll do my best to do right by you on the Arithmancy. She was alway praising your skills there. I'm decent at it, but I had to work for every bit, not like those of you who have the gift for it.)
Alde was a grand old Slytherin witch - over 110 when I met her, plots that ran decades, very clear about her ambitions and her standards and her ideas of how the world should behave. Absurdly high standards and expectations.
Terrifying. I spent most of the first year in tears every night, because I felt stupid all the time. But I knew she'd taken me on as a favour to Alcor (my predecessor, teaching) and I didn't want to let him down, so I kept slogging through it.
It wasn't the Astronomy that was the thing, but all the other skills she thought I needed. Latin. German. Grammar. Rhetoric. Etiquette. How to talk to people at parties. All the social things I'd need to manage the Guild, being a Master. (And as it turns out, being married. She would have laughed and laughed at that.) It got a lot better, after that first year, and I have so many fond memories of sitting by the fire in her library talking on cloudy nights, and her putting music on, or talking about literature and plays and all sorts of things.
She's the one who pointed out that if I was going to teach, I should train as a generalist, so I worked on her chart project as her apprentice, but she also set it up so I worked on projects with other people, did things to demonstrate I really knew what I was doing. Well, half a dozen reasons for that, one of them named Alexander Donnelly.